Junior year will feel very empty next year without a class like sophomore history. Not only did we have the opportunity to learn an incredible amount of material in a year's time, we learned about HOW to learn, study, and analyze (and have fun too!). After this year I know what it means to be a historian. I learned how to prepare an argument and how to develop a strong idea and eventually a thesis based on evidence that we have seen throughout history. History is not about learning facts and events that have occurred in the modern world, but rather seeing a connection between the way things happened. This notion was made clear to me this year. I learned that two abstract ideas that seem completely unrelated at the surface, for a completely random example, the Carolands Mansion in Hillsborough and the Terracotta Warriors in Xian China, can be connected to each other so strongly...even strongly enough to write ten pages about! I will do my best to take the things that I learned to be so fun about history with me next year and throughout the rest of my historical career. Thank you Mama Pugs for the tremendous year you have given us! Please come back to your true passion of teaching history after next year as you are fed up with teaching just the boring English for an entire year.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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